Phil Bryant: ‘Just Go to the ER’

Mississippi governor Phil Bryant sat down for a Q&A with Kaiser Health News about insurance exchanges, Medicaid, and Obamacare. Keep in mind that 19% of Mississippians are uninsured, the fifth highest rate in the nation.

KHN: Some experts may argue people new to Medicaid have many health issues they need to address.

BRYANT: I make the argument that it’s free. It’s free and you have nothing else to do.

KHN: Are there any positive benefits to people being on Medicaid?

BRYANT: Medicaid was meant to be a temporary [stop]gap for providing you medical treatment while you are looking for a job. Now we are saying, you can have a job and still receive Medicaid. So we have changed the whole dynamic. There is very little incentive for those 940,000 people on Medicaid to find a better job, or to go back to school, or to get [into] a workforce training program because they say: Look, if I go over $33,000, [I] will lose Medicaid. There is no one who doesn’t have health care in America. No one. Now, they may end up going to the emergency room. There are better ways to deal with people that need health care than this massive new program.

Bryant is far from the first one to express that sentiment. Mitt Romney did it during the campaign, and George W. Bush famously did so a few years back. But for the millionth time, the ER is for emergencies. It’s in the name. It is not, and never has been, a substitute for long term longitudinal healthcare.

Brilliant. I’m sure the folks over at the Kaiser hospitals just love it when politicians tell the poor to get their care at ERs. Hell, maybe I’ll try it for my next pap smear. Why mess with that silly copay anyway?

And after you can’t pay that ER bill your credit gets wrecked, so when you apply for student loans or for better jobs you get rejected. Brilliant advice there dude.

So, should a dialysis patient go to the same ER three times a week or split his treatments over multiple hospitals?

What they do is go to ER when they start getting really sick to get dialysis. Because they don’t have insurance, they wait until it is an emergency, then show up at the ER. They aren’t getting it done three times a week. It’s costing our county hospital millions just in dialysis patients.